101–110 of 125 posts
> AI and Crypto are net negatives in this regard. Not sure how anyone can with certainty say that AI will be a net negative in the long run for climate change. Logic I think says the opposite.
How can AI be a net positive for climate change? We know what needs to happen to fix it, how would AI telling us the same thing "hit differently"?
> AI and Crypto are net negatives in this regard. Not sure how anyone can with certainty say that AI will be a net negative in the long run for climate change. Logic I think says the opposite.
How can AI be a net positive for climate change? We know what needs to happen to fix it, how would AI telling us the same thing "hit differently"?
If you generate a terawatt hour of electricity with natural gas, most of the cost will be from the fuel. A nuclear plant will have a tiny fraction of the cost come from fuel for the same amount of energy. A solar farm will have none of the cost come from fuel.
If AI lowers construction costs, it will improve the relative economics of non-fossil energy compared to fossil energy. A natural gas plant constructed at half the cost will have its final energy cost decrease just a little whereas a half-as-expensive solar farm will have its final energy cost decrease nearly by half. Making clean energy cheaper than fossils means that it will out-compete dirty energy even in locations where there are no explicit policies to reduce CO2 emissions.
You can see the effects on pricing advantage with this interactive simulation of electricity supply in the United States. If you cut the overnight construction cost in half for all generating technologies, solar and wind dominate the country:
https://calculators.energy.utexas.edu/lcoe_map/#/county/tech
Some example modeling of gas/solar electricity economics in the United Kingdom here:
https://electrotechrevolution.substack.com/cp/160279905
Companies have already started using robotics and AI to construct solar farms faster and at lower cost:
https://www.aes.com/press-release/AES-Launches-First-AI-Enab...
https://cleantechnica.com/2025/02/27/leaptings-ai-powered-ro...
https://www.renewableenergyworld.com/solar/cool-solar-tech-w...
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I agree with your general point, but water usage numbers for farming animals are notorious for being exaggerated. There are studies that take all of the rainfall multiplied by all of the grazing land the cows are allowed on and include that as “water used”. Water usage is also a nuanced concept because water isn’t destroyed when we use it. You have to consider the source and incidentals of processing it, as well as w…
Of course water is not destroyed. It gets contaminated. And to clean it up, you need energy. Basically, we can simplify those equation to pretty much single argument: energy. Whatever you do, it needs energy. And people really really comes very lighty to that problem and waste management. If we would really like to recycle everything property I suspect global energy usage 10x fold at least. For now, its just better (…
Disappointed with the article, especially because it uses "think of the planet" as a weak argument against this technology. > Firstly, there’s the environmental impact Their own blog contributes to climate crisis they are now crying about. We can argue someone in a developing country writing a similar article saying "all these self publishing technologists are making climate crisis worse" and it'll have a stronger po…
Your argument seems to be flattening everything so it's just the same - "everything has an impact" - but different things have different impacts, and each needs to be measured against their utility. Me ordering a coffee at my local cafe has an impact, but it's a good deal less than me driving from London to Edinburgh. The author's argument, as I read it and generally agree, is that we don't really need LLMs to get th…
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> The argument about power usage for developers, as opposed to consumers, Except with MCP, essentially most consumers will become "programmers". See my other comment for the rationale ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43997227 ). (TLDR: MCP lets non-programmers convert their prompts into programs, for all practical purposes. Currently there is a barrier to entry to automate simple tasks: The need to learn progra…
> Except with MCP, essentially most consumers will become "programmers" You are more optimistic than I am. Most people I have seen are using LLMs are at best as an alternative to Grammarly or a document/web summary, or at worst making decision based on outdated LLM advice or as an inaccurate fact-engine. The average person could code using Excel, but most don't even if they know how to use IF() and VLOOKUP().
> The average person could code using Excel, but most don't even if they know how to use IF() and VLOOKUP().
Using Excel (even without IF) is way more complicated than what I am saying. MCPs will enable people to program with natural language. It's not like vibe coding where the natural language will produce code we'll run. The prompt will be the program. You need to put in a lot more effort to learn the basics of Excel.
> Models require massive amounts of electricity and water (to cool servers). Does it? https://prospect.org/environment/2024-09-27-water-not-the-pr... > training GPT-3 used as much water as just under twice what is required for the average American’s beef consumption. In other words, just two people swearing off beef would more than compensate. https://andymasley.substack.com/p/a-cheat-sheet-for-conversa... > It would…
yeah, running GPUs in a datacenter is such a strange thing to fixate on with respect to the overall health of the entire planet. I don't recall it being discussed when the whole "move to cloud" thing started and AWS (+ others) came online, surely those have a larger impact.
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How much of that 500 TWh would disappear if you round to zero everything that consumes 3GWh per day or less? And keep in mind you are calculating for a single app (ChatGPT), nor for an entire industry or tech. Don't look at "civil aviation" but at each airline in particular. I suspect nearly all of it. You framed it such that it appears insignificant, but with this framing nothing is significant.
"No raindrop considers itself responsible for the flood."
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and why focus on LLMs... there is a shitton of other things that use power/resources/... if we are going to be start worrying here we should consistently apply this across everything...
Because LLMs are not deeply embedded in all aspects of our society. It is very difficult to reduce existing usages of carbon (eg cars) in society, as opposed to stopping the widespread use of LLMs.